Mod challenge: find me ten good PB threads from ten permabanned players
A permaban for a toxic player indicates that Riot no longer believes that player capable of reform. Punishments didn't prompt self-reflection, warnings of losing the account were ignored, all the toxic behavior was rationalized with a variety of terrible arguments. Did more than four punishments do the trick for some people? Yes, but this was very infrequent, and not worth the damage caused by all the consistently toxic players who didn't learn and were allowed to keep playing. Riot doesn't believe a permabanned player will improve, and they're not interested in letting them try. Riot wants those players to leave.
These people who are unable to follow rules and behave themselves then go onto the Boards and start insisting that their ban was unjust, and any other player's permaban was unjust, and the number of reports matters, and someone else started it, and so on. When someone disagrees with them, they start to demonstrate why they got a permaban in the first place: poor behavior. They pollute the place with bad ideas, bad advice, and uncivil discourse. Sometimes permabanned players post on each other's threads to show support for misbehavior, like a bunch of convicts banging their tin cups against the bars. What's the point of discussing their ban, anyway? It's permanent, and Riot wants those people to quit the game.
Even now there is a highly-upvoted thread on the front page about how permabans for toxic chat are bad because permabanned players just make new accounts anyway, and how a clever and novel solution would be... stacking chat restrictions. This was posted, of course, by a player who was permabanned for toxic chat and isn't happy about being punished. They have no problem with breaking the rules and annoying people; they just don't like it when something bad happens to them. Note that most permabanned players don't keep playing, and Riot tried stacking chat restrictions but it didn't work and just produced more toxic behavior that was more difficult to detect. The thread is selfish and poorly-researched. And yet, it has tons of upvotes, currently at 71-24, with a poll at 179-59. But you look at the comments and see half a dozen players - all relentlessly toxic and permabanned - insisting that this is a good idea and they shouldn't have been permabanned and it was a setup and it was all the other guy's fault and so on and so on with all the same trash they always spew because they're basically sociopaths. Harsh, but I'm not mincing words here. And most of them say they have a giant pile of smurf accounts. Now let's do some math: a few toxic players multiplied by a giant pile of smurf accounts each... what do you know! That's how many upvotes this thread has. It's an obvious example of vote manipulation, bringing a demonstrably useless thread (the idea has been tried and proven ineffective, remember) to the forefront.
This brings us to my challenge to mods. Genesis 18-19 is the well-known story about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham convinced God to spare these sinful cities if they contained a mere ten righteous people. Unfortunately, there weren't any, and the cities were destroyed.
If you can find me ten separate Player Behavior threads by ten separate permabanned players where the player asked about their ban, behaved themselves, learned, thanked respondents for teaching them the error of their ways, improved their behavior, reformed, and became an upstanding player/member of the community (flying in the face of Riot's real-world data, mind you), then I will at least be willing to entertain the idea that perhaps those extraordinary cases are worth the absolutely massive amount of chaff. We're paying a cost, so there should be some benefit. But if you can't, then I urge you to stop allowing permabanned toxic assholes to trash that Board, and just instantly delete any thread or comment in PB posted by a permabanned player. Don't permaban them from Boards entirely; just remove anything they post in PB.
Note that I'm not just talking about threads that weren't quite bad enough for mods to lock/delete, because that almost never happens even when it obviously should. I'm talking about threads that are actually good and useful from permabanned players.
If nothing else, the time period covered by ten such posts should show us how often we see such a chimera around here, and perhaps make a case for much stricter moderation on low-quality content from players who are already known to specialize in such.
Ten separate threads, ten separate permabanned players, ten separate success stories.
